“I draw a lot of weird doodles on scraps of paper,” says the Canadian cartoonist Jesse Jacobs—true of most cartoonists, no doubt. But few cartoonists’ work is as suffused with the spirit of the doodle as Jacobs’s.

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the celebrated 1979 art film. And yet, after reading it, I was left feeling that something was missing. In both the book and the deluge of Stalker coverage its release has occasioned, perhaps the most crucial, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version. Between 2007 and 2010, a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film. And while they all have the elements of a standard action game—guns, monsters, missions, traps, loot—much of the player’s activity is oddly in keeping with Stalker’s spirit, sometimes even managing to expand upon it.